Like visiting musicians who get food, drink, and a place to sleep, storytellers are treated in the same manner. So it was that a storyteller looking a lot like John Hurt’s character in Jim Henson’s The Storyteller came to be resident here this past week. He settled comfortably into the chair by the fireplace in the Robert Graves Memorial Reading Room and told us this tale . . .
Not all ancient barrow mounds are the resting places of warrior kings long forgotten, some contain things far worse. Some of those securely buried with chains and magical bindings are human, some very much not so. Things that even hardened necromancers have nightmares about.
One of these has no name now, or at least no name remembered now. It was either a being to escort the dead into the next life or something far worse. All that storytellers from time beyond counting have said is that it be left well alone. And so it was for millennia until a Victorian archaeologist decided to dig that barrow mound up. And he didn’t live to tell the tale as whatever it was disposed of all that were there that evening. Only blood and very small bone shards remained of them.
It took a major league necromancer, one variant says it was actually Crowley, to put it back in its resting place as it was not dead, just resting. The necromancer added an avoidance spell to keep everyone away.
Now won’t you sleep well tonight?
